How to Have a Long, Happy Relationship with Your Head of New Business
You’ve just hired your first dedicated new business person—congrats! If you’ve prepared well for this moment, you are about to embark on a satisfying relationship leading to increased revenue, healthy agency growth, and a more sophisticated approach to pursuing the right clients.
I’ve certainly seen my fair share of healthy relationships between agency owner and new business person. They’re a beauty to behold and often endure for years. But unfortunately, unhealthy relationships outweigh healthy ones.
Recently I wrote more in-depth about why I think that is but the CliffsNotes version is this: agencies make the mistake of hiring new business or sales professionals when the pipeline is empty and the pain is most acute. They place unrealistic expectations that are nearly impossible to meet. In the worst cases, they see it as a chance to offload responsibility for the growth of their agency onto someone else.
And, as you might guess, the relationship doesn’t end well.
But, let’s say you’ve brought on a new business person at the right time and for the right reasons. Now, set the stage for a clean, productive onboarding process. Here are five actions you can take to get the relationship off to a promising start.
You set the strategy. They create the plan.
A few years ago, a client of mine, a partner at a digital agency, lamented how poorly their last full-time new business director performed. As an example, he told me they’d asked him to define the business development strategy--essentially who they should go after and why. He and his partners were surprised and disappointed when no clear plan emerged.
I wasn’t surprised.
This business development person, while senior and experienced, was not an agency partner. And he was brand new. He had little context or historical knowledge of the agency to effectively dictate a new business strategy on his own.
Instead, the agency leadership should have taken greater responsibility for defining the growth strategy. Or, at least made it a collaborative discussion with their newly installed business development person to figure out things like:
The short (one-year) and longer-term (two years and more) vision for the agency
How to position and package the services that are most likely to help them fulfill the vision
Where potential growth opportunities lie in the marketplace
Why the right clients find the agency’s expertise valuable
As an agency leader, it’s your job to provide the vision. And, why wouldn’t you want to?
Once a strategic direction’s in place, it’s completely reasonable to ask your new business person to apply their skills and experience to tell you how best to get there.
Where are the gaps you want them to fill?
Most agencies perform better at some points along the buyer’s journey than at others.
Where are the gaps in your sales process? Do you “just need more at-bats” (an oft-heard lament)? Then generating awareness through marketing and promotion might be more important in the short-term than outbound selling.
Are you not closing business? Or are you winning based on discounting your fees? Then the issue might be poor pitching or negotiation skills.
Knowing where your agency is strong and weak will help your biz dev lead respond with the right course of action. Guide her on where she should focus to reinforce weak spots or capitalize on strengths so their plan hinges on the right solution.
This will also help to ensure you’re hiring the right person. The professionals that excel at different parts of the buyer’s journey have different sets of skills and different mindsets (more on this later).
Offer them process and structure but be willing to let them take the lead
An experienced business development person will come to the job with her own methods and approach, but she also must understand and work within your new business policies and procedures.
If you don’t have policies and procedures in place—and many agencies don’t, or they’re ad hoc—then this is an area where you can expect leadership from her. But you still must fulfill your end of the deal. Once she understands your growth goals and you’ve developed a strategy together, listen to what she says she needs to get the job done.
This is not to say you offer her a carte blanche. Discuss a reasonable budget, inventory the resources you’re able to put at her disposal and work with her to build a new business operation over time.
Speaking personally, I wish I had been more vocal in my needs when I was in-house running business development teams. My tendency was toward people-pleasing and I didn’t like rocking the boat. When I needed resources, I’d tell myself, “I’ll figure it out…”, with the result that I didn’t allow myself, or the agency, to be as ambitious as we could have been.
I’ve had the benefit of perspective to see the mistake I made and understand how it hampered my ability to be successful. Now, it’s my mission to break my clients of their own people-pleasing tendencies when I see that those tendencies are having a negative impact on their pursuit of new business.
Establish a strategy for mining your existing network
In my experience, agency owners are schizophrenic when it comes to opening up their networks to a new business person. In theory, it sounds appealing to have someone help you mine those relationships you may be neglecting and turn them into revenue.
In practice, I’ve seen agency owners slam shut these doors once the salesperson is on board.
It’s understandable that, as an agency owner, you’re protective of the relationships you’ve built over years. And, besides, shouldn’t your new business person be building her own relationships? Yes, she should but that takes time, especially if she’s starting from scratch.
Here are a few questions you might ask yourself if you’re wondering about whether to open up your network to your new salesperson:
Are you doing an adequate job of nurturing your contacts yourself? If you’re not, they’re doing you no good anyway. Why continue to ignore these valuable assets?
Are there quick wins that could result? These wins come in the form of new business opportunities as well as a motivated salesperson.
How secure are you that you hired the right person? Introducing her to your network indicates that you trust her, which means your contacts are more likely to trust her too and introduce her to others in their organizations.
How committed are you to her success? Your contacts can be a bridge that leads her to develop her own relationships.
Delineate where the job begins and ends
Yes, there’s a lot to be done to operationalize a new business strategy. I think of it as a new business ecosystem, a set of interlocking and interdependent sales and marketing tools that create growth if they’re right for the environment and are maintained well.
And, yes you’ve made an investment in a dedicated resource to oversee and be 100% accountable for building the new business ecosystem. But its health likely relies on a larger team.
The business development function routinely requires the participation of others from different departments. That may be a designer creating a template, a strategist offering insights for a pitch, or the agency owner taking part in a presentation to a prospective client. It’s a team sport and it’s going to remain a team sport even if you hire a captain.
From the start, be clear—with your biz dev person and your team—what’s expected of them.
Business development is also a function where one person is expected to embody three different sets of skills:
Selling, which requires perseverance, stamina, a talent for building relationships with strangers, the ability to create and nurture a network, and acumen for closing business.
Pitch management, which relies on excellent writing and strategic thinking, a knack for managing teams and information, and an unrelenting eye for detail.
Marketing, which also requires excellent writing and strategic thinking (but a wholly different kind from pitch management), brand-building skills, and a big picture view of the market (versus familiarity with the individual players that selling requires)
Which of these does your agency need most? Hire a new business person with those skills and assign other team members to fill the gaps.
Above all make sure you’re not approaching this new hire with an unrealistic wish to offload responsibility. Like all characteristics of agency culture, it starts at the top. Be vigilant that you are not wittingly or unwittingly encouraging an “it’s your job, keep us out of it” mentality of the team.
New business is a lonely enough job as it is.